Economics and Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics has become a major topic of debate throughout the scholarly community. What has been called the interpretive turn’ has not only led to interesting new approaches in both the human and social sciences, it has helped to transform divided disciplines by bringing them closer together. Yet the largest and most important social science, economics, has so far been almost completely left out of the transformation. Economics and Hermeneutics takes a significant step toward rectifying the situation, introducing scholars on both sides of the divide to ways that hermeneutics might help economists address some of their most important problems. Among the topics addressed are entrepreneurship, price theory, rational expectations, monetary theory, welfare economics, and economic policy. The approaches to economics represented include the Austrian school, McCloskey’s rhetoric approach, Marxian critical theory and institutionalism.